


a mind of winter

by InsufferableArchanist



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Death, M/M, Murder, but i'll try to capture the Flavor™, i wanted pitch in great clothes is that so much to ask, i'm not even going to attempt victorian parlance in accuracy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-01-16 20:31:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21277274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsufferableArchanist/pseuds/InsufferableArchanist
Summary: Two men meet by chance under a moonlit night; the fact that they're both burying bodies might suggest this is not the beginning to an ideal romance. The fact that these men are named Pitch Black and Jack Frost suggest that, perhaps, ideal isn't really what matters in the first place.





	1. those observing and observed

**Author's Note:**

> A Victorian murderers AU that I'm doing for NaNoWriMo. May or may not be 50K words, may or may not post every day. If it ends in a natural place at 2k-ish, I will; if not, I'll just let the word count do stacking damage for the next update. 
> 
> Tags will be added by chapter. Please note that this story will deal with both dark themes and sexual themes. Please avoid this if you are uncomfortable with these, but also let me know if I have failed to tag appropriately. I will try my best to capture possible triggers and an accurate representation of what the content herein is listed as.
> 
> The title is taken from the poem _The Snow Man_ by Wallace Stevens, because it is not only thematically appropriate but also because it's basically a poetic diss track to Robert Frost, who I lifted the line for The Weakening Eye of Day from. An excerpt, for our boys:
> 
> _For the listener, who listens in the snow,_  
_And, nothing himself, beholds___  
_Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is._

The moon is much like a companion.

I think many in my position would liken it to a spouse, perhaps; the truth is that I have had a spouse, and the moon could compare to her neither in loveliness nor in comfort as a confidante. Perhaps, then, one might liken to a sibling, but mine died long ago. So long ago I cannot, in fact, discern what my relationship with him would have been like to measure it against some celestial body.

The moon has always been only itself; omnipresent, both in welcome and unwelcome circumstances. A measure more true than time, for clocks can be miscalibrated by something as simple as the rocking of a ship, or a bit of rust in a single gear. The moon is affected by precious little but itself; its glow follows me as I make my way from the city into the reaches beyond, where even the well worn paths are only tracks wagons have worked into the ground. Eventually, I exceed even that, and the moon follows me, gazing intently as I stop my horse next to a truly massive tree with roots that would likely destroy a wagon trying to move in or out of it at great speeds.

There are times one does not like to be observed. Certainly, this must apply to my position in life in general. It would be ghastly in a very literal sense if a mortician were to relish others in their enjoyment of his work. 

It would be more ghastly still for a murderer to ask others bear witness to his crimes.

The moon is bright against even the dull black of my suit and coat and hat, clings to my features, as if it wishes to denote every fine detail of my physique at work. I bear it grudgingly as I remove the body from the coffin I’ve placed it in, already bound in a shroud.

The corpse inside will bloat and stink soon; it’s only the waxed lining which keeps blood from seeping out. I heft the body over one shoulder and begin my march deeper into the woods. 

My mare will stay where she is, contented with the feed bag she’s been given to chew at. There are plenty of bits of apple and sugar in there, tonight - she is working late for my sake, after all. She cares not one whit if I spend the rest of the evening trudging ever deeper into the forest. But I will return soon enough; my work is not something one wishes to linger at.

Despite knowing this, I also know that I cannot simply stop at the edge of the woods and dig a grave; I must stop when it is right, which is as hard thing to discern as to describe. I simply know it. I feel it. It is all right when the moon stops glaring at me for a moment, and I am certain that the entirety of nature has granted that this is where a body is meant to rest.

Right now, that spot is between several rather large oak trees, their leaves beneath the light dusting of snow and ice all around. Gazing up, one can see the tangle of their branches in a chaotic snarl towards the heavens, parting in a shape which resembles a diamond. The moon sits squarely at the center of it. The eye watching me does not blink, which makes the impression of a shadow creeping over one shoulder odd, at first.

I have had too many objects swung at my head in my lifetime to not reflexively dodge them, if I am given the slightest warning. Something metallic meets the corpse in its shroud as I thrust it forward, turning on my heel, my shovel still clenched in one hand. 

There is a flash of white in front of me, and the moonlight picks an almost cruel glint against metal, still being wielded, pulled back, braced.

The man before me can be no more than twenty, and yet he looks for all the world as though he is well practiced in killing others, and more than anything would like to kill me. It is not the chaotic, crazed joy one might expect. It is, instead, an unyielding flint in his pale, colorless eyes, a tightness in his jaw. He looks as though he’s been carved from the union of a moonbeam and a glacier, and I find myself only bracing my shovel in both hands, letting the spade rest on one of my shoulders.

“I must say, I wasn’t expecting company,” I begin. 

There are several things that may catch one off guard about me; my refined comportment in comparison with my so-called _swarthy_ looks, my preference of dress in comparison with my grim profession. The most common thing that catches Americans off guard, however, is my accent.

The boy looks at me. His grip is still tight on the shovel. He does not rest it against his body - he is merely chambering for a moment. A modicum more hesitation than he showed before, I decide. We can make it work favorably.

“I imagine you can think of what I’m doing out here,” I say. “After all, last wishes are last wishes.”

At last, the boy’s eyes dare to dart beside me. A puff of breath forces itself through his delicate little nose. In the cold air, it makes it look as though he is emptying his lungs of smoke.

“No one wants to be buried in Georgia,” he tells me. 

“No one with any sense,” I concede.

“Especially this far from a church,” he continues, his eyes moving back to me. 

Now that I’ve adjusted to the shock of paleness that he presents, I can truly see his eyes have no hue to them. They’re perfectly silver, glassy and big, ringed by dark lashes. His brows are dark, too. They don’t match his hair, or his skin, or his lips, the unearthly bloodlessness about him; their darkness makes every twitch of adjustment bombasticized. 

“There must be atheists everywhere,” I reason. He grins.

“Not in Georgia.”

“Untrue,” I argue, “I’m standing right before you.”

“You’re a transplant,” he says. At last, his shoulders roll forward. I observe this, and he observes me observing this. 

“As are you, it would seem,” I reply. When this does not merit another comment from him, I cannot help the slight grin that crosses my face, however unsettling I’ve been told it is for others to behold. “You are missing a certain… Twang, sir.”

“You can’t miss it if it’s all around you.”

“A fair point,” I agree. “In any case, it would seem we have that in common. As well as both being out in the forest at night, and… Both retaining shovels on our person.”

“Yeah… That sounds about right.”

At last, the stiff grip he has on his shovel loosens a little. His palms are still facing up, and I get the sense it would be very easy for him to again wield his device in a deadly enough manner to devastate me. I also have the sense he will not be doing this. I lower my own shovel and place it on the ground in front of me, leaning against it as though it were a walking cane.

“My name is Pitch Black,” I say.

He snorts. 

“That’s a ridiculous name.”

“Ridiculous is having every other man in town named John,” I tell him. There is something in the flatness of my delivery that finally cracks the coldness in his expression magnificently. The icy exterior belies a flood of genuine warmth that gushes to the surface in his smile. He laughs shallowly.

“That’s fair. I guess that doesn’t make me much better.”

“Oh?”

“I’m Jack. Frost, I guess.”

“And you were prepared to cause me grief over Pitch?” I ask, my eyebrows rising slightly. “Besides, what do you mean you guess?”

“I mean I don’t know. My, um. Landlady picked it out. Mrs - Uh. Tiana.”

“Tiana Simian?”

“Her husband’s dead. She doesn’t go by Simian any more,” he says, and he doesn’t snap so much as he freezes again, hands wringing the handle of his shovel. They look nearly purple at the tips, and red-raw on the palms. 

“I’ll take you at your word. In any case, Frost… Suits you,” I say. “And Jack is as sensible a name as any other, I suppose. Rather… Anonymous.”

The word hangs between us for a few moments. 

“I sense it may be amenable to the both of us if we were, perhaps… Anonymous tonight, as well. For whatever we came here to do.”

“I was burying a man,” Jack says. “Well. The parts of a man, anyway.”

My nose wrinkles. I cannot help it.

“That’s grotesque. You chopped him up?”

“How else was I supposed to carry him?” Jack returns. “We don’t all have the luxury of a wagon.”

“A carriage, I’ll thank you to remember. How did you even know that I had one, anyway?”

There are a fair amount of evergreens in Georgia; the look Jack gives me could, I believe, induce them all to mellow out into some drab shade of brown or grey and fall from their branches in unison. It is not often that people regard me as an extraordinarily simple fellow, and I can tell from this glance he is now estimating my capacity for intelligence to be somewhat lacking. 

“Your clothes are almost immaculate and you’re carrying a dead body. You tell me how to solve that caper, Mr Black.”

“Pitch… Please. If we’re going to be on such genial terms.”

“Fine, Pitch,” Jack says. “I’ll tell you what. If you’ll give me a ride back into the city, I’ll lend you a hand with your digging.”

“What makes you think I require one?” I ask, and he only smiles lopsidedly. There isn’t much warmth to it, and more than anything, I realize that in the face of the biting cold in his overall being, I desperately want that warmth back.

“You’re wearing soft gloves, for one thing. You’ll tear them up, by the way. Better to just get the blisters and bind your hands up before you put them in gloves tomorrow.”

I frown at him, but begin pulling off my gloves nonetheless. He shifts his weight, moving a little closer to me, and I see his eyes widen a fraction as he prods the body with his foot.

“Christ,” he swears, “That’s heavy.”

“Yes,” I tell him. “It is.”

“And you carried it yourself?”

“Didn’t you see me?”

“I s’pose so,” Jack says, walking on a little more and sticking his shovel into the ground. It yields beautifully for him, and for once it seems as though the moonlight decides to hang just a little more on someone else. We both watch him cleave earth; I am thin, but Jack is delicate, and it makes all of his work look like something otherworldly. 

We pass the time this way for a while before he looks over his shoulder, and I am reminded that he agreed to assist me, not to dig my grave. He is correct in his assessment that I have not been well practiced in this work, but I am hardy. I persist, and the moon holds vigil over both of us as we dig the grave so deep that it covers Jack’s head, and comes about to my eye level. In the shadow of it, Jack is a pale suggestion more than a young man.

“Why did you bring it yourself?” Jack asked.

I stare back at him for a moment. The darkness of my figure is a long stretch of shadow in his looking glass eyes. 

“I was compelled to, I suppose. It was a burden I accepted when I took his life.”

“Is that what you do?” Jack asks.

“Not generally, no.”

“Just sometimes?” he tests.

“Yes,” I tell him. My voice is even, and I am sure of it. This is a truth that does not merit running from. Least of all, I feel from this boy. From this moment that we share in this grave we helped the other dig. “When the circumstances warrant it.”

“For a price?”

My nose wrinkles again. 

“You really are an urchin from that boarding house, aren’t you? Such macabre ideas.”

His slender shoulders rise and fall. “Some people do it for money.”

“...Some debts are not paid with coin, Jack.”

Silence overtakes us once more. Then, Jack shifts, so quietly and so quickly that it’s more like the wind whipping through one’s hair than it is a boy climbing from a hole in the earth.

“You’re right. Some debts are paid with carriage rides back to town,” he says. I can tell by his voice that he’s smiling again, even though his face is all shadows when he peers back over the grave, down at me. Moonlight wreaths the pale edges of his hair like a crown of stars. “So shift your ass and help me with this body, Mr Black.”

I sigh.

“It’s _Pitch_.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's been almost a year since i posted the first chapter and all i can say is WHO'S READY FOR AWKWARD CARRIAGE RIDES?????????
> 
> honestly, if i can be a bit personal, i know the world blew up, but also my own personal and family life blew up. a lot blew up. i'm getting things settled, and i can't wait to get this story off of my chest and... into... your... heads? listen, let's forget the metaphors for now.
> 
> official summary: jack and pitch make their way back to savannah and discuss several things, not the least of which are personal affectations of the inverse - or not - nature of oneself. also if making references to the moon as your friend means you're gay.

“Huh,” I say, and hear the sound of light footfalls stopping just a little behind me. 

“What is it?” Pitch asks. His voice has lost its silken quality, but there’s something still low and sinuous about it, the breathlessness of digging and hauling and shoveling dirt and leaves back in place suggesting only a slight rasp. It would be distracting if his obvious exhaustion weren’t funny.

“You said you had a carriage. I guess a hearse is a carriage, of sorts, but I have to hand it to you for being a more creative interpretation than I would have thought of.”

I can hear him gathering his breath for a returning comment, but his horse catches my attention before that. It’s big in every sense of the word, and so perfectly black that the moonlight shining on it suggests its contour rather than the outline of the beast itself. Pitch makes a noise from behind me as a reach one hand out to smooth against her shoulder.

“She doesn’t -” he begins, but my hand is light against her body as I stroke her. She snorts a little, eyes me, then goes right back to munching on her feed bag. 

“She does, apparently,” I tell Pitch, and despite trying not to laugh at the flat look he gives me as he walks up to take the feeding bag off of her face, I really can’t help it. His features are already so long and angular, alien to everything I’ve seen; sourness just makes them flex in queer ways that seem too dramatic. “I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it. I’m the exception for a lot of people, I hear.”

“Are you now, Mr Frost.”

“Hey, I thought we were _genial_.”

“Not when you steal the affections of my horse,” he sniffs, taking my shovel, too. The items go into the back of the hearse, which has been draped inside the glass compartment with black cloth. Good planning, on his part. 

“Well, Mr Black, then this ride into the city is going to be pretty uncomfortable.”

He looks at me for a moment. There’s a strange quality to his eyes - any kind of light seems to hit the backs of them, illuminating them in flashes of gold, or maybe grey. It makes them seem enormous on his face, with almost a haunting glow. They bore into me - well. 

They try.

He abandons the exercise a moment later, climbing onto one side of his cart. I can’t fault him for putting back on his gloves - it’s freezing. A place like Savannah has no business being as cold as it is in the winter, and this year has been especially brutal everywhere. Not that it bothers me much. I settle for sticking my hands in my pockets. 

A thought seems to occur to Pitch as he takes the reigns.

“How did you get this far out of the city in the first place?”

“I walked,” I tell him. When he looks at me again, I offer him a shrug. “From the city. Took a couple hours, but I can clear a couple miles each hour as easy as breathing. Figured I’d just walk back, too.”

“...I really must have several words with your landlady.”

“Leave her out of it,” I say, and this seems to catch him off guard. Or maybe it doesn’t. There’s a calculation in his eyes I can see before he snaps the reigns very gently and guides his horse back onto what passes for the road. 

“She doesn’t know about it, then?” Pitch asks.

“She doesn’t need to,” I say. “I pay rent. I chip in money for care of the kids. We’re happy enough.”

There’s a pause that tells me I’ve miscalculated something, but it’s only as Pitch opens his mouth that I have the horrible realization of what it is.

“Not like that,” I tell him. 

“...Of course not. She must be still in mourning.”

“She’s not,” I say. I can hear in my own voice how much I don’t want to have this conversation, but it just keeps happening. 

“Then what shame is there in being happy enough? Settled in a family, with children-”

“It’s not like that. She’s like… A mother isn’t the right word, but in that vein. I think everybody’s got to feel that way about her. Pretty sure even St. North feels that way about her, and that man has wrestled bears before.”

“I see. Nurturing, then,” Pitch ventures.

“No… More like. Challenging. You know? Like a hero training someone… Or something…”

My cheeks only colour as I see a smile settle on Pitch’s mouth beside me. He might be trying to contain it, but his features don’t allow for much subtlety. I try to focus on the road in front of us, but my chin tips down against my neck and I can feel my shoulders hunch, despite trying to avoid looking any more embarrassed than I have to.

“There’s nothing wrong with being challenged by someone you also happen to love,” Pitch says. “My wife was an extraordinary woman. She could beat any man in a duel with pistols, and a great many more in a duel of wits. Myself included.”

“Huh,” I say again. It’s not the first time I’ve said something similarly disbelieving out loud to someone when it’s not the best plan, but if I never did that, I wouldn’t be Jack Frost.

“What?” Pitch asks. The carriage bounces over a particularly knotted piece of ground, and I continue to look anywhere but my companion’s face. In fact, shutting my eyes for a few seconds sounds soothing.

“Nothing, I just… Guess I didn’t see you as the marrying kind.”

Now is when the carriage should come to a stop. Now is when my mouth should get me hefted up by the man beside me and bodily thrown from the cart. Now is when I create yet another disaster for myself by a man who could very easily, and reasonably, ruin my life.

Instead, Pitch Black is silent as the night around us. When I steal a glance, he’s staring ahead. We move in relative silence for several minutes before Pitch’s voice sweeps back into it, softly caressing my ears. 

“She proposed to me,” he says. “I hadn’t thought much of marrying before then, either. She was beautiful and bold. I had no reason to deny her. She deserved everything she asked for in this world.”

“You know,” I tell him, “That’s not what that phrase usually-”

“I know what it usually means,” he tells me. “I am weighing the merits of confirming your insinuation for you. It is quite rude.”

“We’ve already confessed murder to each other. Inversion seems a little less drastic.”

“There are often worse things done to inverts than murderers, Jack.”

For the first time since I’ve had the pleasure of knowing him, Pitch Black takes the air from my lungs; he may as well have buried me in the woods, filled my mouth with gravedirt. I have enough control not to stare agog at anyone, under near any circumstance.

Yet I do stare at him.

“I know. I just don’t know if it matters to me anymore. Nothing seems to follow me but the moon,” I tell him.

“Quite poetic of you.”

“Is it?”

“Typically, references to the moon being one’s companion are. Though, I often feel this way about it, myself,” Pitch remarks. The outline of his face is so sharp and still, he seems like a statue. Then, his mouth moves again, “Perhaps that’s what marks us.”

“Us?” 

His eyes roll towards me again. 

“Jack,” he says, and at once I feel rage and misery mix in my gut. Over how he says my name, over how it sounds now like he’s said it a thousand times before, and I’m hearing it for the first time. Over how it makes his eyes bore just a little deeper.

I hate him.

“You should keep your eyes on the road,” I say.

“Jack,” he says again, wrapping the reigns of his horse slowly around one hand, despite how it must be so swollen, so raw, so painful. When he reaches to touch my shoulder, I dig my fingernails into his hand. 

The bastard doesn’t flinch. He stares at me, and it pierces something deep and glassy, a vial of liquid pouring down the back of my brain. 

I hate him.

“Jack,” he murmurs. 

His breath smells sweet and cold as our lips touch.


End file.
